The rapid growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web (“web”) has resulted in a proliferation of web search engines for indexing some of the billions of web pages available. As is well known, the web is a hypertext information and communication system using a Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”). HTTP allows users to access these web pages which can utilize, among other things, a standard page description language known as Hyper Text Markup Language (“HTML”). HTTP may also be used to access files and other data in many different formats including text files, image files, executable files, data files, and other data sources. Typically, HTTP accesses these web pages, files and data through an addressing schema commonly known as a Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”).
By specifying a URL, an end-user is able to access virtually any accessible web resource (text files, image files, executable files, data files, and other data sources) available from a web server connected to the Internet or other network.
However, without knowledge of a URL, an end-user must typically rely on a web search engine that can search a web index or directory to locate URLs for relevant web sites.
While certain search engines ambitiously attempt to broadly index significant portions of the entire web, other search engines may focus on a more specific target, such as a particular “vertical market”. A search engine directed to a particular “vertical market” may index selected sites of interest to consumers in that market. Additionally, the search engine may index content that has been prepared for the site hosting the search engine. Finally, the search engine may index other sites. By limiting sites indexed, the search engine is of greater value to consumers in the vertical market of interest. As a result, consumers in the vertical market may be drawn to the site, knowing it may provide focused search results of interest. This appeal may of course be exploited to generate advertising and similar revenue.
As an illustrative example, one such vertical market may be the market for golfing goods and services in a particular geographic region. A particular regional golf web site wanting to attract end-users to the web site may wish to provide end-users with a robust search capability, allowing the end-users to search for not only content of the regional golf web site, but also other golf related sites in the geographic region, and golf sites generally available on the web. Moreover, the regional golf web site may further wish to generate revenue from advertisers, such as regional golf courses and golfing goods manufacturers, by listing the URLs for their web resource in a list of search results. At the same time, the regional golf web site may wish to avoid presenting any search results that may be inappropriate, such as a URL of a web site operated by a main competitor of an advertiser. As will be appreciated, in this illustrative example, search results are obtained from a plurality of search resources.
Previous designs for querying and selectively presenting search results from a plurality of search resources have been limited in their flexibility, particularly where a plurality of indexes corresponding to the search resources have radically different structures and search requirements. A more flexible approach to merging and presenting search results from a plurality of search resources is desirable.